Burley tobacco harvesting remains to this day an essentially manual operation. Tobacco is harvested by first detaching or cutting plants near the ground. Five or six plants are then impaled upon a wooden member or stick having dimensions of substantially 1.times.1.times.54 inches. Tobacco-laden sticks are left in the field for several days until such time as the tobacco plants wilt. The sticks are then collected and transported to a curing barn. The sticks are placed or stored at spaced intervals on parallel rails in the curing barn. The inverted plants hang down from the sticks between the rails with the necessary spacing between the plants for on-the-plant curing of the leaves by natural ventilation.
As with any labor intensive procedure, the harvesting of tobacco in the manner described above is a relatively slow procedure. Further, with limited skilled labor available, the process is also relatively expensive. Despite a clear need and desire for a less expensive and faster harvesting procedure, up to this point in time no commercially successful fully automated method of harvesting tobacco has been developed. The primary reason for this failure appears to be related to the fact that burley tobacco plants are highly susceptible to leaf damage and loss. This problem is the result of leaf turgidity, plant size and orientation of the leaves on the plant. These factors clearly limit the extent to which any mechanical component can engage a burley plant and still provide effective harvesting.
An automated tobacco harvester recently developed by the present inventors is fully disclosed in co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 010,176, entitled Apparatus and Method for Automated Tobacco Harvesting and filed on Feb. 2, 1987. This harvester is designed so as to carefully handle and manipulate the burley plants and thus reduce leaf losses during cutting and storing to a level previously only achievable by the most skilled manual laborers.
The harvester is fully mechanized. It includes a system for cutting the plants adjacent the ground. The plants are then conveyed upwardly and inverted through 180 degrees so that the leaves of the plants fall naturally along the stalks. In this way subsequent handling of the plants may be performed without causing any substantial damage to the plants and also the leaves. The stalks of the plants are then cut and notched for receipt at spaced intervals within a portable curing frame of the type described in this document.